


To Be Brave

by chchchchcherrybomb



Series: Sorry About [4]
Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Anxiety Disorder, Apologies, Apologizing to dead people, Canon Compliant, Forgiveness, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Pottery Barn, Ripping plotlines off from Ladybird because there are no rules, Sorry about, Talking To Dead People, Visiting the grave of your pretend best friend to discuss young adult literature, references to like dead ends, that awkward moment when Georgia Stern lives in this timeline, you know as you do
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-16
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-15 08:24:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13027089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chchchchcherrybomb/pseuds/chchchchcherrybomb
Summary: Evan took a shaky breath, taking in the grave stone, focusing again.“I shouldn’t be here….”He said it aloud and immediately regretted it. Did people actually speak to the dead like this, or was it just another thing reserved for television, like not saying hello or goodbye on the telephone?Evan knew that he shouldn't be there. He knew he had no place in this story anymore. But he kept coming back.---Canon Compliant, pre-finale





	To Be Brave

The car was actually not a bad car.

It ran fine. Decent tires. Gas mileage wasn’t terrible either, considering it was used and ten years old.

It used to be Jared’s. The Kleinmans had gotten him a new car as a graduation gift last summer, and his mom had bought Jared’s old car off of them for $500 as a graduation gift for Evan.

It was too much.

That was what he had told her upon getting the keys. It was too much. She shouldn’t have bought him a car.

He kept saying that he would pay her back for the car. That it was too expensive, too much of a present, that he didn’t deserve it.

Which. He _didn’t_ deserve it.

Evan knew precisely what he deserved, and generosity and kindness from his mom was not on the list.

But his mom refused to take any of his money, even after he got the job at Pottery Barn. She insisted that he needed a car to get to work. She said he should be saving up for college, and that someday when he had a good job, he could return the favor and buy her a used car.

He had tried really hard to laugh at that for her. With her. She was trying so hard.

So hard.

He didn’t deserve it. He really didn’t.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t trying.

It was.

It was just that trying wasn’t exactly easy.

He figured that having a car meant some relative freedom. But that first few months that Evan had his own car, he only ever really used it for work. To and from work, back and forth, a routine.

Even now it was rare that he strayed from the familiar in his car. The longest drive he had made all summer was to pick up some IKEA furniture that he had spent ages considering. He needed a bookshelf; his old one was beat up and the shelves were starting to collapse. His mom still made him check in every four hours, even though he was nearly nineteen. The IKEA trip had been a Big Deal, sad as that was to admit. He hadn’t even asked Jared to accompany him. He’d driven the hour out of town on his own, picked up the furniture, and driven back. All on his own.

Checking in every four hours, of course.

Sometimes Evan didn’t know if the checking in was to make his mom feel better or if it was to make himself feel better.

He didn’t invite Jared on the trip.

Evan usually didn’t invite Jared places, though.

It took a long time for him to apologize to Jared - Evan had been so ashamed, so broken up over the end result of The Connor Project. He recalled as a kid, reading Harry Potter, that there was a quote about how forgiving people for being right was harder than forgiving them for being wrong. Evan had to take a long time to forgive Jared for being right about how Evan had acted and treated him, and so his apology was a long time coming.

Jared just told him it was no sweat, when he finally managed it. Evan thought he seemed suspiciously buoyant after. He even invited Evan to hang out with some of his camp friends. Evan had declined. It was nearly finals, he wasn’t sure he could handle it if any of them recognized him from the videos online…. He hadn’t gone. But Jared hadn’t expected him to go.

Status quo.

Except now Evan had a car.

Having his own car did grant Evan something he hadn’t anticipated - an opportunity to go to a place he had never managed to visit.

The cemetery was on the outskirts of town. Two miles from the now fully restored Connor Murphy Memorial Orchard. The first time Evan went, he was too anxious to get out of the car, terrified that he would be spotted. The second time was about the same. The third, he ended up circling the block a few times because he thought he recognized some people from school with flowers.

In the fall, things changed.

In part, his work schedule. More night shifts as the holidays approached. More overnight shifts that let him take afternoon classes at the community college. More early mornings, unsupervised. More quick drives past the cemetery and the Orchard as he made his way back home.

So.

In October he stopped one day.

And got out of the car.

The headstone was almost beautiful up close. Black, shiny and smooth. Reflective, like a mirror. It glittered a little in the sun.

There wasn’t a lot there. No quote. Nothing like the others in the surrounding area, bedecked with things like “loving son” or “wonderful friend” or “beloved brother” or anything of the sort. Just a name and his birth and death dates. CONNOR L. MURPHY.

Evan didn’t know what the L stood for.

Judging by lack of flowers or candles, there hadn’t been any visitors in a while. Not that Evan was surprised. The interest in The Connor Project had dropped significantly, from what he had heard. He’d deleted his facebook and instagram, in part to resist the urge to check on it.

In part to resist the urge to check on Zoe as well.

Either way, from the snatches of conversation he had overheard at school at the end of the year, interest was down, and nothing Alana had done seemed to able to bring it back up. Then there had been a Buzzfeed article at the end of September, on the project as it stood one year after it had gone viral. The article said that the Murphys had declined to comment, but it still talked about the abuse that the family had received after the publication of the note.

Evan had gotten a couple of emails from someone regarding the article, of course. The reporter was begging to hear from the “face of the Project,” asking all about why he had disappeared just as the kickstarter hit its goal.

Evan deleted that email address. And didn’t respond, obviously.

Last year an email from a writer at Buzzfeed would have been the best thing ever. Now it was just a painful reminder. A lump in his throat that he couldn’t swallow. A ghost to follow him around.

Evan heard from Jared that Alana was still taking the criticism from the article hard. Which wasn’t fair. Half of the things hadn’t even been her idea; it was all his. _His_ mistakes…

He kept debating if he should call Alana. They hadn’t spoken since a brief and awkward hug at graduation. He doubted she wanted to hear from him. She was off in college. Ivy League, if the rumors were true. She was probably too busy running some other national organization. Still, he figured that he owed her an apology.

Not that she was the only person he owed that to.

Evan took a shaky breath, taking in the grave stone, focusing again.

“I shouldn’t be here….”

He said it aloud and immediately regretted it. Did people actually speak to the dead like this, or was it just another thing reserved for television, like not saying hello or goodbye on the telephone?

Evan’s eyes traveled the length of the cemetery. It was barely seven in the morning. The whole place was deserted, a wide field of crisp fall air and uniform rows of headstones. The start of a perfect autumn day, cool and bright.

It had been a day a lot like this day when Evan got the news that Connor had died. As the lie took off, he recalled being somewhat relieved that he had missed the funeral. He doubted he would have survived a funeral, even for a stranger. When his grandpa died at the end of seventh grade, Evan had completely broken down at the funeral home. He swore he could smell formaldehyde on his skin and clothes for weeks after, and started obsessively smelling his hands after each wash to see if he had finally made the smell disappear. He washed them so much that the skin dried out, started to crack and bleed in places. Evan would have been a nightmare at Connor’s funeral. He would have somehow made the whole thing about him, found himself being comforted by Connor’s grieving family, stolen away the last displays of love and affection from a boy who clearly needed it.

Evan was just glad he hadn’t had to go to a funeral.

“I just… I’m sorry,” Evan said, because there wasn’t anyone watching him make a fool of himself. He wondered, for the thousandth, millionth time, what Connor would have thought about this lackluster apology.

But he didn’t actually know him so it wasn’t like he could even guess. Their interactions had been very limited despite the fact that they’d gone to school together forever. Evan thought they all might have worked on a school project at Jared’s together once in middle school. The day was fuzzy in Evan’s mind - his grandpa had been in the hospital, so his focus had been split - but he didn’t remember much about it.

He had fucked this up. So badly. He knew that, he’d known that, he’d spent the last year dealing with how badly he had fucked it up.

But a part of him wished…

He felt like he somehow owed it to the memory of the person whose memory he had stolen and made his own. He owed it to Connor to learn something about who he had actually been.

Evan frowned at the gravestone. “I’m. It’s just… I’m… I’m really sorry.”

* * *

 

He went home. He’d promised his mom that he would go through some of the stuff that was clogging up their storage closet. He knew she was seriously considering moving into a smaller place when he went off to school next year, and that she was trying to get him to slowly acclimate to the idea.

He was supposed to go through the box of things from elementary and middle school that his mom had saved. See if it was worth keeping.

There were stacks and stacks of writing projects and drawings from art class that he went through carefully, frowning a little at an old (badly drawn) picture of a U-Haul in the driveway. He set that aside, in the toss pile.

There was a bunch more. A seventh grade report on _The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian._ The mark on it was an A, but Evan remembered that the regular English teacher hadn’t actually graded it. He’d stopped coming to school for some reason. The substitute had drawn a smiley face at the top, complimenting Alana and Evan for their use of the word “insufferable” when describing the white kids at Junior’s new school. A report on the state bird of Colorado. A class journal Evan had kept in eighth grade that included a passage about how glad he was to be neighbors with Georgia Stern.

She had messaged him, not long after The Connor Project took off, saying she remembered Connor from eighth grade and was sorry for Evan’s loss. That she was glad Evan and Connor had become friends; she had always thought they’d get along when they were kids.

He deleted his facebook not long after that. He never messaged her back; he was too afraid saying anything at all would have given away his lie.

He wondered if she had seen the note.

Evan really hoped that she hadn’t.

Something about her seeing that sat weirdly with him.

At the bottom of the box, Evan found his class’s eighth grade yearbook. And smirked a little. Each kid got a page to do whatever they wanted with, as a memento of their middle school experience. Evan’s was a couple of pictures, mostly from when he was younger, and one or two from the holiday concert where Evan had helped to run lights because he didn’t play an instrument and was too shy for choir. Jared and Evan smiling awkwardly at Jared’s bar mitzvah. Evan could barely make out the bruise between Jared’s eyes.

From where Connor Murphy had punched him the day before.

He almost smiled at the memory, because, well. Jared had almost certainly had that coming.

Evan flipped through the book more. Jared’s collage was pictures of him hanging around Brian Harris, mostly. He’d forgotten about Jared’s brief popularity in middle school.

He paged back to see Alana’s page, an organized display of photos with little scrapbook style stickers. A lot of pictures of her winning awards. Perfect attendance. Honor roll. Spelling bee champion.

Georgia Stern had turned in a poem, something that Evan thought he recognized, with little cartoons drawn around the border of the page.

Evan flipped through the whole book. Sabrina Patel’s collage of photos, Brian Harris’s miriade accomplishments in sports, kids whose names he had already forgotten.

He was avoiding looking at the M’s.

Evan sighed, looking over his shoulder like someone might catch him looking.

Connor’s page didn’t have any photos. It was black and white, a single spaced list of his ten favorite books.

Evan took in the titles. He stared at them. Tried to piece together something about him from knowing he liked books like _The Little Prince._

* * *

 

Evan’s cheeks ached from all of the nervous smiling he had been doing that day. Cash register duty. The holidays were fast approaching, and the store was swamped. He’d been chewed out already for wishing a woman “Happy Holidays” when he ran her card for some extremely overpriced throw pillows. She had demanded his name and went on for at least a minute about how “disrespectful” he had been by not saying “Merry Christmas.” It kept everything in him not to just dissolve, hyperventilate, completely meltdown right there at the checkout counter. Stupid. Stupid. He couldn’t even tell some unfairly angry woman to shut up. He was so stupid, so fucking moronic, and he just kept. Staring at her while she raged. Struggled to breathe. His manager Jamal had mercifully stepped in, gave the woman some kind of coupon, and nudged Evan, smiling, as the woman left.

“Should have wished her a Happy Kwanzaa.”

Evan nodded. If he was a normal person, he would have told Jamal he was Jewish. Or, well. Half Jewish. His mom and him hardly celebrated. Evan wasn’t even totally sure when Hanukkah started that year. If he were normal he might have thanked Jamal properly and said that he appreciated the help, because he had an anxiety disorder and angry people made him incapable of language. If he were a normal person, he would have laughed at how stupid it was to be angry over something as innocuous as “Happy Holidays.”

Evan wasn’t normal.

So he said nothing. Just ducked his head, and smiled politely, and rang up the next person in the sea of people. The crowd started to thin around noon.

The thing was.

Apparently Mrs. Murphy shopped at Pottery Barn. Evan spotted her immediately. He could probably pick her out in a crowd of thousands by the way his stomach and chest ached when she was nearby. She was there with an older woman. Maybe her mother? Evan wasn’t sure how close they were. Evan was so distracted he nearly rang up a decorative reindeer three times. He had to call Jamal over to void the extra deer, who told him it was no sweat, that the holiday rush got to everyone sometimes, and that wasn’t it time to take his break?

Evan was sent to take his fifteen, and that meant walking through the floor to the back of the store to get to the breakroom. And the whole time he kept his eyes glued on her movements, her red hair, her posture, the hand of the older woman resting lightly on her arm and giving it a reassuring pat. Mrs. Murphy looked… tired. Exhausted. She looked like she felt as old as the woman shopping with her.

God, he had really hurt her.

God.

Evan swallowed and kept his eyes on the floor, hurrying to the back.

He caught just a second of the older woman saying, “Larry might not appreciate all of the work you do but -”

Evan felt himself flush with embarrassment for having overheard. For being able to imagine this was a conversation that was based in money, which apparently Mr. and Mrs. Murphy constantly fought about. He had naively believed that rich people never argued about money, but his time hanging around the Murphy household had proved him very wrong. They always fought about money, specifically the amount Mrs. Murphy spent compared to the amount that Mr. Murphy made.

Zoe said they had been like that for as long as she could remember.

She admitted once, while they were tucked away in her bedroom and could suddenly hear an argument brewing between the adults downstairs, that as kids she and Connor would blast loud music and throw silly dance parties to drown them out.

“Then again, they were usually just fighting about _him_ so…” Zoe had said, rolling her eyes, then frowning.

Evan had kissed her then, thinking, idiotically, that he could make it better for at least a second.

And she had smiled and said, “You know, music works both ways. At drowning things out.”

And he had blushed, and she had kissed him, and Evan recalled being surprised that her parents let her keep a lock on her door. He knew his mom didn’t have any rules about not having girls in his room because he was a massive loser who objectively shouldn’t have the opportunity to _have_ a girl in his room. But Zoe was pretty and talented and funny and obviously her parents must have had rules about who was allowed in her bedroom. But those rules, apparently, didn’t ban him. Or the lock on the door.

 

Evan managed to avoid Mrs. Murphy after his break ended. He rang up an onslaught of customers and smiled smiled smiled as he ran credit cards and counted change and by the time he was to clock off, Evan was exhausted. But he had promised his mom he would pick up something small for his mom. She needed something for the Secret Santa the other nurse’s aids had set up at work, and she had asked him if he didn’t mind making a pit stop at the Bath and Body Works in the mall on his way home.

Which was of course when he encountered her. Just as he was walking out of the store with a vanilla scented candle that seemed like an inoffensive present his mom could give to her coworker.

Evan thought he felt his heart physically stop.

Mrs. Murphy, holding a Starbucks cup, smile slipping off of her face, stopped as she saw him. “Evan?”

He froze.

The old woman with her turned to see what Mrs. Murphy was looking at, and her expression grew troubled. The older woman looked a lot like Mrs. Murphy up close; same heart shaped face, same kind eyes.

Evan couldn’t catch his breath.

The moment stretched out. A thousand heartbeats. A million blood cells racing through his body.

“Cynthia?” The older woman said. She had put on a smile that felt plastic, insincere.  “Who is this?”

Mrs. Murphy blinked, as if startled, and her face rearranged itself into a smile. “Oh. Mom. This is Evan.”

The older woman turned to him, smiling this sad sad smile. She looked… so sad. “Oh. Of… of course. You were Connor’s friend?”

Evan glanced at Mrs. Murphy, uncertain, paralyzed, “I-I-”

“Yes, mom. Evan was a dear friend to Connor.”

And then Mrs. Murphy’s mother was hugging him tightly, and Evan wanted so badly to recoil, pull away, run away, but…

He caught Mrs. Murphy’s eye over her mother’s shoulder. Her smile was gone, replaced with some expression Evan didn’t understand at all.

She hadn’t told her own _mother_ about the lie.

Even _he_ had done that.

He knew the Murphys hadn’t gone public about it…

She hadn’t told her own mother.

Evan stepped out of the hug, smiling numbly at Mrs. Murphy’s mother, feeling very much like he was about to break, crumble, totally meltdown right outside of the fucking food court.

“He was always a quiet kid,” Mrs. Murphy’s mother said. “So I guess I really shouldn’t have been surprised that he never mentioned you when he stayed with me that summer. But I wish I had known. It might have been nice for him to have a friend to visit.”

“I. Um. I-”

“Are you in college these days?” Connor and Zoe’s grandmother asked him.

Evan nodded, then shrugged and shook his head. “Um. I. Um. I took um, a year off? Actually? Working, working here m-mostly. At um. The mall. Well. At Pottery Barn, back… there.” He gestured vaguely. “But-but I’m taking a few classes at the community college, just you know, earn some uh… earn some credits?”

Mrs. Murphy’s mother nodded. Her face went all soft and understanding. She took his hand between hers, small and cold and frail, and patted it. “I’m sure things have been tough on you this past year.”

“Um… I mean….”

“It was so good to meet you, honey,” the woman said, patting his hand again. “Take care of yourself.”

“Thanks um… thank you.”

Mrs. Murphy kept giving him an unreadable look, and eventually she said, “Have a good holiday.”

“You too,” Evan repeated faintly.

Evan looked at Mrs. Murphy, helpless, and she stepped toward him and pulled him into her own hug. Brief and loose and unfamiliar, and she patted his cheek and then they were both gone, just gone, leaving him standing in their wake.

He walked to his car, head down, and drove straight home.

He climbed the steps to his bedroom.

Collapsed beside his bed.

He didn’t deserve the unexpected kindness. He didn’t deserve their silence. He had broken them, he had hurt them so badly, so much more that even imaginable, and they hadn’t breathed a word of it to anyone.

It took him a long time to manage to breathe evenly again. To muster the energy to wipe away the snot and tears.

When he crawled out of bed, after he texted his mom, Evan dug out the eighth grade yearbook he had found a few weeks back.

* * *

 

“We ought to do something,” Evan’s mom announced. The both of them were sitting at the kitchen table, textbooks out. Evan was drinking tea, his mom coffee. It was late morning. Sunday. They were both off of work. “We’re never off on the same days.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Okay?”

His mom gave him an encouraging smile. They met at the front door half an hour later, bundled up in their jackets, heading out into the world. His mom drove. They played the radio on low, NPR. It was familiar and nice and eventually his mom turned down a street in a neighborhood a lot nicer than theirs.

Evan grinned stupidly at her.

When he was younger, they used to do this. They’d let themselves dream. They’d go and explore big, nice houses painted these big, rich colors and imagine a better life. It stopped when Evan’s anxiety got worst in his teens; suddenly interacting, let alone lying to strangers was far too much for him.

But his mom smiled confidently and parked her old car and they both climbed out. The house had three stories. A huge deck out the back, an in ground pool.

His mom led the way. They smiled at the realtor who broke down the details of the property, of the value, of the five bedroom three bath house with a lot of room for storage and a room that had been converted into a home office/study/library. His mom marveled at the shiny hardwood floors. Evan drank in the way the sun seemed drawn to every single window in the house. The upstairs bedrooms had plush carpeting and walls in pastel shades.

“How’d you like to live somewhere like this, huh?” His mom said, smiling.

“I… I know, right?” He stumbled a little but smiled all the same.

They explored the kitchen next, pretending aloud about the dinners they could host if they moved in here. His mom lamented that the countertops weren’t granite. Evan giggled and said he thought the backsplash needed updating.

Evan did his best not to let the bubble pop. Not to think about how his mom was going to move into a newer, smaller place.

He kept a smile on his face all through the house, all through the next where he and his mom marveled at a walk-in closet the size of Evan’s bedroom at their house.

“I don’t understand needing this much space, honestly,” His mom said, smiling at him cheerfully. “You could live in here! My first apartment was about this big!”

Evan coughed out a breathy laugh, nodding, agreeing that it was a lot of space.

They agreed that they ought to grab some lunch after they toured a third house in a subdivision that Evan had only been to once as a kid. Jared had convinced their parents when they were ten that they were old enough to go trick or treating in the richer neighborhoods because he heard rumors that people gave out full sized candy bars. Evan was mostly surprised that they agreed because Jared’s parents usually replied with things like “Purim is in a few months, sweetie,” when it came to stuff like that. But I guess at ten they were tired to fighting Jared. He threw the worst kind of tantrums as a kid.

“Isn’t that…?” Evan heard his mom say. He whipped his head toward her so fast that his neck cracked.

“Fuck,” he said so so faintly that he wasn’t even sure that his mom heard him. They were backing out of the driveway as a very familiar car pulled up.

“Maybe we should go,” Evan heard his mom’s voice like it was coming through a tunnel. Her face was red. Of course.

Of course.

Of course their stupid let’s-look-at-houses-we-can’t-afford thing would look especially pathetic when someone who could actually afford the house pulled up. Of course his mom’s response was to get out of there to avoid opening the can of worms that was that shame.

Normal people didn’t freak out for the reasons that Evan did.

His mom cleared her throat. “Doesn’t. Wasn’t Zoe… she’s got another year of school, doesn’t she?”

Evan nodded, then shook his head, then shrugged. “I think. She’s a senior now, I think.”

His mom nodded. She drove out of the subdivision fast, faster than she usually would, the only other time he’d seen her drive this recklessly was the day that Evan had been surprised to see her in the Murphys’ living room, drinking wine and getting more and more mortified as she realized just how much he had been lying to her lately.

Evan stared at the way her knuckles went white on the steering wheel. Eventually she said, “I’m sorry. I. Obviously I had no idea…”

“No. No. I mean. I know. It’s not… it’s not your fault.”

His fault, it was all his fault, he was a liar who made this mess.

“Do you think that they’re moving?” She asked gently.

He shook his head. “I don’t… I dunno.”

He could picture the empty bedroom upstairs, beside Zoe’s, with the sign on the door that said “Private Property” and the exposed support beam that Zoe told him was where Connor had… where he’d… He could see this one star on the ceiling that glowed so bright against the darkness in that room.

Evan swallowed. Tried to breathe, breathe out slowly.

“Mom. I.” He stopped. She was pulling into the parking lot of the Starbucks in town. How could he even say this.

“I know. It’s okay.”

“It’s… it’s not.”

She smiled sadly, reaching out and putting her hand on the back of his neck, firm and reassuring. “It will be.”

 

* * *

The mall was packed and Evan was trying to decide if he could take a Xanax and still be functional during the rest of his shift. Maybe if he wasn’t running the cash register. How was it that so many people were clamoring to buy things at Pottery Barn a week before Christmas?

He was definitely going to get fired. He’d fucked up running this woman’s card and had to call Jamal over to fix it, and Jamal seemed really annoyed. Then he tried to hand a woman who paid in twenties an extra ten dollars as change, that she mercifully noticed and gave back to him. And the store was packed, packed with people, too many people, and it would only be a matter of time before someone recognized him and said something like how sorry they were about Connor or about how horrible the Murphys were and he’d even up crying and snotting and throwing up right then and there and he’d get walked out by security in front of all of these people. He was definitely getting fired and his mom would be super disappointed and he’d only saved up enough for maybe one semester.

Two if he got some financial aid.

He’d end up getting stuck having to work at a gas station or something because they needed people for all hours but he was awful with people so he’d probably get fired from that too.

“Evan, go take your lunch,” Jamal said, sounding annoyed. “Are you sick? You look like you’re going to barf.”

“I’m.. no-no, I’m fine.”

“Okay, well. Take your lunch.”

He practically ran to the timeclock to punch out, grabbing his coat and rushing outside. It was cold. It smelled like cold and car exhaust and it was snowing a little again. His breath came out rapidly, little streams of mist.

_Don’t start crying._

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, hard, hard, hard, pressing until he could see lights popping behind his closed eyes, little flashes like lightning.

He could hear footsteps approaching and begged, pleaded, prayed to whatever thing controlled the universe that they would retreat, leave him alone.

“You’re Evan Hansen.”

_Fuck._

He choked on the air he was trying to breathe in, coughing suddenly, his eyes popping open to take in a girl staring at him. She had red hair and a nose ring and massive amounts of make up smeared around her eyes.

“Okay that sounded creepy. It was meant to be a question.” She crouched beside him. “You don’t remember me?”

He blinked blinked blinked and his heart hammered away painfully against his ribs.

“We were neighbors for a hot second in like. Eighth grade.”

“Ge-” He gasped, still choking.

“Georgia, yeah. _Hey_.”

He stared.

“Didn’t you have shit to take for this kind of thing in middle school?”

He nodded, fingers fumbling through his pockets, thinking fuck it, thinking maybe a Xanax would make his shift easier. Fuck it. Fuck. Fuck. He sucked in a big breath, let it out slowly, cramming a pill into his mouth and swallowing it dry trying not to think about the NPR story he had heard in his mom’s car about how dry swallowing pills was horrible for your throat because it could like puncture your esophagus.

“I… I have to tell my boss I’m sick.” He said suddenly, standing up too fast and taking off, almost at a run, and she just stared after him.

Georgia Stern just appeared to him in the middle of a fucking mall and he was going to have a fucking panic attack because he got overwhelmed by running a cash register he was so stupid so pathetic so horrible.

He was in the store again, and Jamal caught his eye and held up one finger to say, “Just a minute.” He hurried over to Evan, took one look at him, and said. “Go home.”

“Am I fired?” Evan blurted.

Jamal looked confused. He shook his head. “No, kid, you’re sick. Go home. Get some sleep. We’re overstaffed this afternoon anyway. Kelly and Chris both just got here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It happens. I told you not to eat at the sushi place.”

Evan nodded frantically, and Jamal led him to the timeclock where he changed Evan’s lunch punch to an end of shift punch.

“See you later.”

Evan nodded, walking out the back door of the store toward his car.

“ _Hey_!”

Evan jumped and yelped loudly. Georgia Stern was standing there. She wasn’t a hallucination. She was smoking a cigarette.

“What do you want?” He cried.

“Are you okay?”

“No.”

“Will you be?”

Evan shrugged, helpless, suddenly feeling like the ballooning out of control energy of his panic was just deflated, gone, missing. He felt like he was sagging against this own bones, his body heavy. All of his words seemed to be sitting in his mouth, chewed up and disgusting, like something you’d spit into a napkin when your parents weren’t looking so they wouldn’t know you thought it was gross.

“What… what are you doing here?” he asked because what else did he ask.

“My asshole dad lives here,” She said.

“Oh.”

“My mom sent me to his place for Christmas because she wants to bang her new boyfriend. And it’s not like I have anything better to do so.”

Evan nodded.

“Are you in school or whatever?” She asked.

“Sorta. No. I just took a couple of classes at the community college.” He shook his head, trying to stay in the conversation. “Y-you?”

She laughed. “Nah. I mean I finished high school in one of those delinquent schools for teen moms and idiots who never showed up but like. College’s not on the radar.”

Evan tried not to look judgemental. He nodded, biting his lip, wanting to get out of this conversation. Far away from this. Crawl into bed and sleep until next year and hope maybe a plane would fall out of the sky and crush him and only him.

“So.” She took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. Another one. Evan had lost track of the first. “You never messaged me back. When I messaged you last year.”

“I… I didn’t know what to say.”

“How long had you guys been friends?”

Evan bit his lip. “We. Weren’t.”

Georgia’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

“It wasn’t. I lied.”

Georgie shook her head. “What the fuck?”

“I’m… I’m a.” He sighed. Sniffled. “I’m in therapy? And I had to write letters, like, to myself. They were supposed to be, be like… pep talks?”

“What the fuck kind of pep talk?”

“Like… ‘Dear Evan Hansen, today’s going to be a good day and here’s why…’” Saying it outloud, again, just made it sound more insane, pathetic, sad. “I. Sucked. At writing them. And the letter… the letter everyone thought was… He. Connor. He took it from me. And I guess he still had it on him when… when he died.”

“And his fucking parents thought it was a suicide note,” Georgia said, still sounding angry. “And you let them”

“I… I told them. Eventually. It. I made it a mess.”

“Why would you tell me this?” Georgia said, sounding disgusted.

“I don’t know,” Evan admitted. “I guess I just. People deserve to know I wasn’t… I’m not. I’m not a good person, or friend, or-or whatever. And I just. I don’t know.”

“That is so fucked up,” Georgia said. “And selfish.”

“Selfish?”

“Yeah,” She said, angrily. “The truth fucking _sucks_ . I.” She laughed hollowly, shaking her head. “I watched you - your stupid fucking videos! I got my ass into _therapist’s…_ ” She blinked a few times. “I thought. What the fuck, man? Why would you tell me that?”

Evan shook his head.

“Do you go around telling everyone this? Should I go call up those buzzfeed people and tell them you’re a goddamn liar?”

Evan shrugged. He didn’t know he didn’t know he…

“Why would you lie about something like this?” She asked.

“I just… I really don’t know.”

Georgia laughed hollowly again. “You’re lucky that ghosts aren’t real, or I bet your ass would be haunted.”

“I’m sorry.” He was. He didn’t know what else to say. He was just sorry.

“Did he have anyone then?” Georgia said, throwing her cigarette on the ground. It hissed as it hit the snow. “Wasn’t there _anyone_?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course not,” She said bitterly. “Kids like us… well. We’re easy to miss until we’re gone, right?” She shook her head.

He remembered her from eighth grade, the cuts on her arms sometimes that he pretended not to see, the fact that he was so scared to lose a friend but more scared to lose one because he tried to help.

“Wait,” Evan said as she turned away. “Are you okay?”

She glared at him. “Do I fucking look okay?”

“I don’t know. That kind of stuff is easy to hide.”

“Like you’d know anything about it.”

“I… I do.” Evan took a large swallow of air. “You said that you watched the videos, right?”

“So?”

“I broke my arm.”

Georgia crossed hers over her chest.

“I was climbing a tree and… then. I just _know_. Okay? I know. So if you’re not okay…?”

“I’ve gotta go,” Georgia said.

“I’m.. I’m really sorry,” Evan said. “I never meant to hurt anyone, and I. I know I’ve hurt a lot of people. And I’m sorry.”

“I can’t believe I felt sorry for you,” Georgia said, walking away. "Asshole."

* * *

 

It had snowed. Just a little. Just a dusting. Just enough so everything looked kind of like the brownies with the powdered sugar on top; sweet and cozy and warm.

And Evan was hanging out in a cemetery, alone, as the sun came up. You know. Super normal.

“I…” He was still apparently in the habit of talking to a headstone. As the sun rose, the shiny black sparkled, and Evan felt compelled to knock the small amount of snow that had lodged itself in the letters away. Until you could make out the entirety of CONNOR L. MURPHY uninterrupted.

Evan cleared his throat, trying again. There were no tracks in the fresh snow. There were no flowers on Connor’s grave. There was no way he was actually supposed to be here, but Evan just couldn’t stop himself.

“I… I guess I don’t really know if you were religious,” Evan mumbled. “Or if you did Christmas or whatever. Your mom, she mentioned… um. Bar mitzvahs. That she…” Evan stopped. Tried again. “Anyway. So. I noticed that there wasn’t a whole lot of… stuff here, lately. And that. Is a bummer. Or… Anyway, I brought a non-denominational holiday wreath.” Evan set it down at the foot of the headstone, resting it back against the shiny black of it. It smelled like pine and Evan thought that was a good smell, religious or otherwise.

“So. Um. That, uh, book? Maybe you don’t remember, but we were in the-uh. The same eighth grade class? And you, in the yearbook, you put in a list of your ten favorite books.”

The wind blew a little, rustling the wreath and Evan’s hair.

“So. I read _The Little Prince._ I… I never actually read that one before.” Evan stuffed his hands deeper into his pockets, hoping to get them a little warmer by keeping them closer to his sides. “I think. I think that drawing for the… for the narrator is sort of like, like writing for me,” He went on, feeling idiotic. “Like. I. I can’t really. Talk very well. At least…. At least not off the cuff. I have to, to rehearse and practice. But when I write things? When I write things down… I do a better job of explaining when I put things on paper.”

Evan shook his head. “Like. Anyway. Thanks for. Um. The recommendation. I guess.”

If this had been a year ago, he might have imagined a conversation. Like a full, proper, conversation with a dead person. Because Evan had made Connor up in his mind so fully and completely (and fictionally) that he could hold conversations with him. He could chat at length about the pros and cons of lying to the Murphys and the world about his friendship with Connor. He could debate if Zoe would really hate him.

Hell. He could probably even pretend his way through a conversation about a book that some version of Connor had read half a decade ago and, apparently, liked.

But it wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.

He had to remind himself of that a lot, at first, after the truth came out. Because sometimes.

It was stupid. Really stupid. Silly and pathetic…

Sometimes he missed Connor. He missed him. He missed him acutely, painfully, right in a place between his ribs.

But of course he hadn’t known Connor. He missed an invention. He missed a lie.

He missed the best friend he never had.

But.

Well that was the part that had really gotten to him lately. Connor was the best friend he’d never had, such, but he had been a real person. Not some manic pixie dream boy best friend who talked about girls and bands and trees with Evan. He was a real, living breathing person. Who had gone to school with Evan. Who had punched Jared in the face once. Who had read at least ten books and liked them enough to make them his eighth grade legacy. Who had a sister, and a mom, and a dad. He was real, he had lived, and he had been. He had been a living and breathing person.

Until he wasn’t.

He had been so close that Evan could have reached out and touched him, for most of their lives. They were in the same homeroom for all of middle school.

And Evan. Hadn’t. He’d never reached across the distance, he’d never talked to Connor, not really, not until that day in the computer lab.

It was his own fault.

He might have changed their lives, both of their stories, if he had ever once made an attempt to actually talk to Connor. If he had spit out the words, “I’m sorry, it’s a stupid therapy letter,” that day in the computer lab. If he had said something else after Connor saying they could both pretend to have friends. If had said anything at all, anywhere from ages seven to seventeen, anywhere in that decade…

He might have had a friend.

He also might have gotten his own nose punched in seventh grade.

He wouldn’t know and Evan knew he could drive himself crazy, like literally clinically crazy, imaging the possibilities that would never be.

The sun was properly in the sky now, but it was cold. The wind was icy, laughing at him, like a mean spirited kid running away after sticking an ice cube down his collar and watching him squirm and yelp in response.

“Would you have liked me?” Evan asked a cold, smooth grave marker. “Because, well. Because I. I think I might have liked you. Maybe. I don’t know. Zoe… she. She thought it was weird, that we would have…  It doesn’t matter. I think I might have. I wished we’d known each other, like properly. And not just because I… not just because then I might not have fucked up everything and everyone. Just because. I think I might have liked you. Maybe we could have, you know… been friends.”

Evan stared at the snow, hard.

“I could… really use a friend.”

* * *

 

It was Christmas Eve.

He and his mom hadn’t bothered caring about religious affiliation or holiday spirit or any of that. She was working, he worked the morning, and now he was eating cold leftover pizza in his sweats, surfing the internet disinterestedly. It had been unseasonably warm all day, and it was starting to rain outside.

Jared texted him earlier about how he’d gotten roped into some kind of discount Matzo Ball event sponsored by his parents’ temple. He’d snapchatted Evan a couple of times miming having a gun to his head.

Around eight o’clock, Evan heard a knock at the front door. He frowned, thinking that he wouldn’t be able to shoo away carolers, and hoping that it was just a lost relative of some neighbor who arrived at the wrong house.

He pulled the door opened to find Georgia Stern standing there, frowning. “So. You get it.”

“What?”

“I reread that letter. The one everyone said was Connor’s.”

He nodded.

“So. You really get it.”

“Yeah.”

“So… Could I talk to you?”

Evan’s eyes went wide. “Sure. Come in.”

* * *

“I can’t believe you still have this.”

Evan shrugged. Georgia was staring at the photos Evan had assembled in his eighth grade yearbook page. He had pulled it out while they talked a little about what was going on in Georgia’s life. She was smiling a little. “Oh shit, look at you! You were _tiny_ in middle school.”

Evan grinned sheepishly. “Yeah.” She said it like they were old friends reconnecting, not like she had come here because he had admitted, among his other sins, that he had tried to kill himself two summers ago. Part of him wanted her to leave, to just to back to his steady state of isolation. He had a book to read. He didn’t know how not to feel weird that she had showed up unannounced while he was wearing sweat pants and then told him all about how hard things had been for her lately.

He wanted her to leave but only because he didn’t know how to have anyone here.

“Lord, I forgot how awkward I looked,” She said. “Look, I have boobs already. In the eighth grade!”

Evan smiled awkwardly.

“So.”

“So.”

“Not to be rude but… like. You fucked up pretty bad last year.” She looked at him like she was hoping for some kind of revelation. Some answers.

Evan didn’t have any of those.

“I did.”

“So how do you just…?”

Evan sighed. “I dunno. I just do.” He sighed. “Here,” he said, pulling the yearbook out of Georgia’s hand. He flipped to Connor’s page. “I mean. I’ve been. Well, there’s this… I… I’ve been reading these. That. Helps.”

Georgia looked down at the page. Snorted. “Dork. You sure you didn’t have a thing for him?”

Evan shook his head. “I. No. It’s just… it’s literally the _least_ I can do.”

She nodded. “So it’s some kind of weird self-punishment?”

Evan shrugged. “No. I don’t think so. Maybe… I think it’s more like. I dunno. Like trying to understand, like, who he was. Since I messed up how people will remember him, I should. I should at least remember the real stuff. I guess.”

Georgia nodded. “Oh. I leant him this one,” She said, pointing to _The Perks of Being a Wallflower._

“That’s um. Next on my list.”

“I guess I’m glad he liked it.”

“Yeah.”

* * *

 

New Year’s Day. At dawn.

Evan got a car in the summer, and in the winter he got up early and drove it to a cemetery. In a strange twist of fate, he actually had gotten invited to a party the night before, but Evan felt like he just wasn’t ready for that.

He wasn’t ready for a whole lot of things.

“Hey.”

The grave never did answer him. Which Evan was more than a little bit grateful for. He’d brought some bright yellow daisies from the grocery store with him today. The black of the headstone and the white of the new snow made it look kind of dreary.

There weren’t any new flowers.

Or footprints in the snow.

Evan swallowed hard, swallowing the fact that he was the only visitor.

“So. I ran into Georgia Stern. That was weird. I um. I told her everything.” He sighed, shifting from foot to foot, finally placing the flowers down.

“I really liked _Perks of Being a Wallflower,_ ” He said after a minute. “I wish I’d read it sooner. Like middle school or something. That would have… been good. To read then. To know about then.”

“I… I hope you don’t mind,” Evan said after a while. “But I might wait until it’s a little warmer out to visit next time.”

The grave said nothing.

Evan was thankful for that.

He wasn’t ready for a whole lot of things.

But maybe he was a little readier than he had previously thought. Not to put this behind him, but to stop letting it consume him. To be brave. Or at least braver.

  


**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "Wild Heart" by Bleachers.


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